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Keiffer Jackson. Their mother, Ullie Jackson (who was to emerge as the
preeminent leader of the Baltimore Black freedom movement in the late 1930s)
was representative of the deeply local character of much of the Baltimore Black
community: she a native of Baltimore and came from a Maryland family that traced
its lineage back to an enslaved African chief and a signer of the Declaration of
Independence, the white Maryland slave-owner Charles Carroll. Their father came
from deep Southern roots. Keiffer Jackson grew up in Mississippi, a place he
detested because of his childhood experiences of brutal racial oppression, traveled
widely in the South and border regions, and only settled in Baltimore some years
after his marriage to Lillie.4
On Lillie Jackson's side, the family became an established part of the small,
but important Black middle class in Baltimore and Maryland in the late nineteenth
century. Lillie Jackson's father, Charles Henry Carroll, who reportedly learned to
read and write in the big house of the Douregan Manor Plantation where he grew
up, became, as a young man, the de facto director of "colored" schools in Carroll
County, Maryland. After he moved to Baltimore, he ran a marginally successful
business selling coal, wood, and ice. Her mother, Amanda Bowen, who taught
school for a number of years in Montgomery County, proved an especially
independent and resourceful woman, and a capable business person. She owned
and operated a Baltimore boarding house with a first floor sweet shop and ice
cream parlor, known as Miss Carroll's Place, that became a popular gathering spot
in the Black community. Lillie Jackson, her parents, and her siblings, were among
the group of more affluent Black Baltimoreans that were able to escape the
alleyway housing and move onto major street-front around the turn of the century.
In 1903 they bought a house on Druid Hill Avenue, which W.E.B. DuBois
subsequently described as "one of the best colored streets in the world."5
Education was important to the Carroll family, and Lillie Jackson (then
Lillie Carroll) graduated in 1908 from Baltimore's Colored High and Training
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